Washington has some complicated long-term problems in front of it that both Democrats and Republicans will have to wrestle with in the coming years and even decades: out-of-control entitlement spending, a crumbling infrastructure, climate change, to name a few.

But how can government possibly work on so many big challenges — requiring sustained policies, budgets and political attention stretching years over the horizon — when it's always so hyper-focused on the next election?

With the new year approaching, POLITICO senior reporter Darren Samuelsohn interviewed someone who makes a living studying future trends and advising governments and private companies: Eric Garland, a St. Louis-based policy forecaster.

No, he doesn't have a real live crystal ball. But he does have some ideas about what America's leaders should be thinking about if they want to take a slightly longer-frame view on the country's challenges.

Garland envisions a national economic revitalization that starts with decaying cities like Detroit. The country also would stand to benefit, he says, if its citizens were even more wired up to stay informed on what their representatives were doing, and vice versa. “Government is immeasurably responsive because of social media,” he said.

And what can policy makers do to be better planners themselves for the future? Garland proposes bringing back the Office of Technology Assessment, a think tank created during the Nixon era that studied Cold War-inspired science and tech questions. Newt Gingrich’s Republican revolution killed the office, but he says it could come back without much cost. “You need basically an Internet connection and some pencils,” he says. “Maybe a laptop or two.”

Darren Samuelsohn: What surprises should we be ready for in 2016?

Eric Garland: One of the things that will probably catch people will be financial, where we see and luxuriate in the cheap price of gas. Right? We're down to 36 bucks a barrel here in December for West Texas Intermediate. And a lot of people in America were cheering energy independence that was going to come from fracking. Well, the break-even price for that is $75 a barrel in most of the wells. So you have a lot of highly leveraged companies that are not going to do well in [the] future, and a high percentage of the high yield or junk bond market, which goes into making that extra cream on the top of our pension funds, they are going to be destabilized along with some traditional retailers that have taken on a lot of junk bonds that people don't know about. When that becomes unstable and then we have to go, "Wait a minute! What are the assumptions behind our pension funds?" Nobody gets as nervous as when we tell them that their retirement isn't as secure as possible.

DS: Switching to political trends, where do you see the country’s discourse going in a post-Obama era?

EG: I look at this as related to Citizens United and McCutcheon, where you have small groups of people with enormous amounts of money that now the Supreme Court has said, "Yes, that's speech," and we can direct our political discussion in the direction of people that have a large amount of money, which is, by definition, a small percentage. That leaves the great masses unrepresented, and the masses have issues such as long-term care for their elderly, collapsing infrastructure, jobs in small towns. Those are real pressing needs that everyday Americans have. And the more we get into the red meat issues and special interests for certain industries or corporations, we disconnect from that which makes the country run.

I actually predict in the future that you're going to see more extreme and wacky and entertaining and scary political movements because people will go, "I want to hear anybody that says something that means something to me, even if it's the dark side of my nature."

DS: What is Washington getting wrong about the future?

EG: I think we were too slow to jump onto alternative energy, and, you know, we're a car-based culture. The overall macro trend for energy has been a transition to the grid, and it sounds weird because gas is $1.50 to $1.70 right now, and so we can all drive where we want for Christmas, just like the good old days. I, myself, am thinking about getting my 1968 Buick Skylark Custom from high school. It got 4 gallons to the mile. That's doable again now. But, if you look in terms of the macroeconomics around the world, look at the infrastructure investments that other countries are making. They're in [the] electrical grid.

DS: Does the two-year election cycle hobble government's ability to plan for the future?

EG: I don't think so, because if you look at the governments around the world — parliamentary governments, absolute monarchies, military junta — all of them have different time frames to turn over the leadership and make new policies.

Let's not forget that most other countries have domestic issues and internal disputes between demographics and folks, so we're probably not as bad as all that. But America still remains a young nation for whom 50 years is a long time, and…that probably makes it harder for us to look at the future more than our election cycle.

DS: Where do you see the U.S. economy growing in the future?

EG: I think the future of the country is going to be "Do we repair Detroit?" What do we do there? It's at this perfect place between — it's "Détroit" in French, "straits"—between Windsor, Canada, and the United States. There's a huge reason to be there. What do we do other than just make apps and run hedge funds in those places? And, instead of doing what we did in the 20th century, where we blow out old farmland and we build brand-new fairly ugly infrastructure — and, by the way, petroleum-intense, energy-intense infrastructure in these suburbs — what do we do with these gorgeous old city centers that have a real vitality to them? They haven't been taken care of. What do we do to make that the sustainable driver of GDP in the future? I think that's our big challenge.

DS: Which political leaders do you credit for smart future planning?

EG: You have to go to Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, who's probably one of the greatest futurists, just died not long ago. He's a guy who took a fairly malaria-bitten port town in Southeast Asia that was suffering from this world war that had just raged all around it, and he said, "This is going to be one of the greatest city-states in the world." And he made it happen and it was through policy. And he looked at, "Well, okay, if we don't all nuke each other, what will people want to do? They'll want to trade. This is a great place to trade. So we'll have shipping. We'll have telecommunications. We'll have finance here." And he took it from a fairly sleepy place to a $300 billion city-state.

I've had the pleasure of working with Albert II, the Prince of Monaco, on a program that was called Monaco 2029. And they were looking at the second phase of transformation of the principality. Albert's father, Rainier, had inherited kind of a grimy port town with some casinos in it and, because he was married to Grace Kelly, he looked at the shape of the banking industry coming up and the role of glamour and made it almost a media property with a financial system attached to it. Now they realize the financial system is probably going to go in another direction. But between those two leaders, you've got a kind of futurist leadership that we could borrow some tricks from.

DS: What did America’s past leaders get right about the future?

EG: Our investments in technology have gone on to create decades of prosperity. If you look at the Internet, you can't look at our current innovation and our leadership without looking at the space program, which was actually motivated by fear that the Soviets were going to jump ahead of us. Our immigration policies of taking people from all over, all the talent that's being wasted under military juntas and fascist dictatorships: "Come here, send your kids to school, be one of us. We're not afraid." That's been throughout our history an incredible strength. It would be a shame to see us turn away from it in the modern day.

I think the Eisenhower Interstate System, we might look back on with some regret that might be in the mistake column of cutting through the middle of cities and destroying neighborhoods and building the suburbs. That might be something we go against.

DS: That was my next question. What did our leaders get wrong?

EG: The eugenics in the 1920s, that wasn't very nice. I'm going to say Jim Crow wasn't very nice….I have to go to Winston Churchill, who said, "You can always count on Americans to get it right after they've exhausted all other options."

DS: Is the challenge here dealing with lame leaders?

EG: No. Actually, I find the pessimism about "We've just got terrible people and that's the reason everything is terrible." To be an effective futurist, you have to read history, and I'm addicted to Roman and Greek and Chinese and whatever other history I can get my hands on, and there's nothing new under the sun, and there's nobody new doing it. And, if you're talking about corruption and all of that, read Roman history. And I think of a couple quotes out of the Greeks that went along the lines of, you know, "Kids today, they sass their parents. They're lazy. They have no work ethic." That was Plato.

And there was another book of Greek oratory where—it was just sort of an everyday—it would be like the C-SPAN of Greece back in the day—and there was a speech about "why is it that we lionize and we near worship the discus throwers and the javelin throwers when it's the teachers? The teachers are our future, and why don't we pay them more?" And I read that and I was like, "It has been 2200 years. We are not going too quick on that."

DS: Are voters to blame them for poor planning for the future?

EG: I'm not going to blame the people either, because thinking about the future is hard, if I've learned anything, and we are at an inflection point.

Most people in America grew up during a certain period of time where we had a very intense mythology. We had beaten an obviously evil regime, in the Germans and the Japanese in World War II. We were victorious. We had the military prowess at that point to take over the planet. We did not. We rebuilt our enemies and we traded with them. And then we got into the ideological struggle with the Russians, and we're for freedom and we always do the right thing, and there's prosperity and it's all good and …everyone else who could have competed with us has just blown up all their infrastructure and it's going to take them 23 years to catch up with us, so our corporations are going to dominate. There's a lot of mythology in that.

We're going back to a world that looks a lot more like history, where we are one of many players and we are learning to find our way in the world; and a lot of it, between technology and the roles of different countries, doesn't look like anything that we've seen, and there's a lot of emotion about that and it's a lot of confusion. And then you have leaders that have to spend most of their time raising money and not look towards the future or they have to focus on hot-button social issues instead of real issues for the country. You know, you've got a dynamic that's not as useful as it could be.

So I don't find villains in anybody, really. I see people playing a game that maybe if we just look at the game a little bit, I think we can get much closer to leading this country towards a prosperous future. We got a nice place here.

DS: How do you suggest government address the things in the future it can’t prepare for—Donald Rumsfeld’s famous ‘unknown unknowns’?

EG: I think government actually has a huge knowledge management project.... There probably needs to be another approach to how we educate our elected officials and not just have it be from a certain angle in Washington, where you have special interests that are probably behind a lot of the points of view, although the special interests are often the best armed with information. It's definitely from an angle. I think our democracy needs to work more on making sure that there is immediate information — I'm thinking like an intranet of "here's all the issues we have out there." And, in fact, it shouldn't just be for Congress. It should be transparent.

You know, you could have Facebook groups or Twitter feeds or whatever where your elected official from New Hampshire or wherever is looking at this issue and you're all learning together and you can have some feedback on this. I think that's possible.

I have a friend who lives in Bloomfield, New Jersey, and she has a mayor who's young...in his 30s or 40s. And she says that for running this town, he is on the Facebook group for their municipality all the time: "Did snow not get plowed? You put a comment on the wall," and he's like, "Yeah, I'll call that guy." You know, trash not picked up? School issue? Government is immeasurably responsive because of social media. I don't know if we could run the entire Pentagon that way, the Department of Defense that way, but you see there's opportunities for innovation that are out there that will coordinate the talent and the information, and we might find that the...people aren't stupid, and the idea isn't stupid.